Executive Summary
For my analysis I will outline some of the unique features that IceRocket offers and then take you on a journey comparing the real-time search engine to one of its lead competitors - Technorati – also a powerful engine that brings an interesting aspect to real-time blog search. In this epic battle of the engines - the two will square off fair and square, with only reigning victorious. in becoming the most useful when trying to see what's going on in the blogging world, twitter world, and just plain search world. You will see that I side with Technorati by the end of my analysis, and it is my goal to showcase why this was the case, but hopefully you will see that each has its own individual feel & strong points. As well, both contribute in their unique way as you will see.
I decided to base my queries for this analysis on information related to my term project, in efforts to gain a better understanding of both projects. For my term project I am studying the U.S. sneaker industry, but more specifically, how Nike's ability to collaborate with smaller brands and individuals has allowed them to capitalize on lesser known sports such as BMX. Both Icerocket and Technorati lend a good ear to what the blogosphere is writing about and what Twitter-heads are tweeting about - so hold on tight as we analyze IceRocket and compare it to competitor Technorati.
It’s my full intention for readers to walk away from this analysis, feeling as though they know more about the blog/twitter search world than they did coming in, and that they feel connected with either IceRocket or Technorati for their research in the future – or decide they never want to use either one again – no hurt feelings here. As well, I will compare and discuss which engine gets the job done best.
IceRocket Reviewed
For someone looking to use a real-time blog/twitter engine that offers more than just web search capability, look no further than Mark Cuban backed engine - IceRocket. Although IceRocket doesn't divulge much information about their daily activities or what makes them tick internally, I have been able to get a good sense of their feel, and would like to share some of the results with you. IceRocket if you're listening - hello and welcome.
IceRocket is an engine offering search in seven categories, listed below and includes five non-search features, of which two I will discuss. Since IceRocket searches in real-time, it is an engine that allows for instant tracking and can be a great tool for bloggers and those that like to stay up on information by the minute.
1. Blogs
2. Web
3. Twitter
4. Myspace
5. News
6. Images
7. Big Buzz - which gives the top results from each category neatly on one page (Awesome in my book. I talk briefly about BB further down.)
One of the three additional features includes a free email service offering 100MB of storage, these features are almost self-explanatory so I didn’t feel it necessary to discuss in my analysis; besides, you can’t beat Gmail (in my opinion). So let’s begin our discussion of the features, and then showcase some of the other highlights of IceRocket.
The rubric for the two additional IceRocket features goes as follows:
Ease of use: How easy was the engine/feature to use.
Reliability: Was the engine prepared to handle my search.
Uniqueness: Are there other engines/features on the market that are better than what IceRocket currently offers.
Overall: My personal ranking based on how much I enjoyed using the tool and its effectiveness.
(all on a 1-10 scale)
Blog Tracker
For someone new to blogging, Blog Tracker can be a relatively easy tool to integrate, and can uncover a good amount of information about your site, enabling you to grow quickly. Some of the pros to Blog Tracker, but not exclusive to, are its the ability to export all data to Excel, or the option to save it in a text format allows users much flexibility in tracking trends in their traffic, as well as using the data to better allocate marketing efforts, etc. Since Blog Tracker only offers limited insight into your blog, it is ideal for beginners who might not want the additional insights that a similar service such as Statcounter, or Activemeter have to offer.
One of the main cons to Blog Tracker is that it doesn't offer nearly as much customization and site information as competing statistic dashboards. Statcounter.com, a free service ($ upgrade available for even more options), offers nearly double the features of what Blog Tracker does, such as tracking visitor lengths, download activity, and popular pages. These can be handy, but to the beginning blogger, these might be unnecessary - so I say Blog Tracker will do the trick.
Ease of use: 8
Reliability: N/A
Uniqueness: 5
Overall: 6.5
IceSpy
If you enjoy reading slow scrolling keywords this feature is for you.
I decided to review this feature simply because it is an almost useless, but entertaining app, and in my opinion extremely worthy of recognition. Let me try and explain. IceSpy is IceRocket's shot at a slow scrolling display of commonly searched web keywords that other IceRocket users have browsed for. Unlike most of the other IceRocket features, this one seems to be for those that have no search destination in mind, and just need a quick push. If you take the quick out of my last sentence, I would agree. They sure do give you the push but they don't give you the time back that you wasted reading keywords that make no sense, or are in foreign languages. If this ever comes of use let me know.
One thing I do appreciate about IceSpy is the simple layout and design. The program fit the design well - take a look at the screenshot below. Navigation back to the main Icerocket page is simple, allowing you to stay as long as you'd like with hassles of retyping the URL. Overall, in terms of calling this a resource beneficial to web search, I am not sure it qualifies.
Ease of use: 10
Reliability: 8
Uniqueness: 9
Overall: 9
Syntax + Big Buzz
Unfortunately IceRocket doesn't offer a lot of snazzy syntax options, and at times even dislikes common syntax - but it does offer quick URL searching. Instead of pointing your browser to IceRocket.com and then typing your query, which takes two steps, now you can easily search the Big Buzz feature in one step. Big Buzz is IceRocket’s ultimate search interface allowing users to search for a single query that returns results from all six of IceRocket’s search pools (Web, blogs, twitter, etc.). Not only does this shortcut save time, it also allows for a quick overview of a given topic.
To search Big Buzz directly from your URL, just point your browser to yourquery.icerocket.com and low and behold, your search has been granted. This is a feature that I appreciate and would like to see Technorati implement something similar in the future.
IceRocket search syntax
• Search by title of the blog post by using the search syntax - title:"Nike 6.0"
• By author, by using the syntax author: Mel Gibson
• One of my favorites and one search that I use a fair amount while working on my final project is the tag search, which searches for keywords that the author tagged the post with. tag:niketown
As well, you can combine syntax on IceRocket while searching such as: [author: "Steve Jobs" Apple ipod] should return results written by Steve Jobs, on the Apple IPod.
IceRocket vs. Technorati
Here I will begin comparing the search capabilities of IceRocket, to Technorati - and how they differ functionality wise. To do so, I will be walking you through a search and sharing my observations, recommendations and other commentary.
Precision
Precision is the first metric that we will use to analyze IceRocket and Technorati, because this calculation tells you what percentage of your results are relevant out of the total number of retrieved and relevant. We will compare the engines based on precision and see which one yields the highest. This will be an important aspect to understand and discuss, as the higher the search engines precision, the greater the chance of finding relevant information efficiently and quickly. For all of the precision calculations I will be using the first 20 results.
Calculating precision can be done by following the equation below:
Precision = (Number of relevant retrieved by a search engine) / (Total no. of relevant results + Total no. of irrelevant)
To test for precision we will use the classic Nike 6.0 sponsored video Writing on the Wall and will see what the blog world reactions, and comments are on the video. The query will be "Writing on the wall + nike," using the the word "Nike" to ensure we are retrieving relevant results.
The first up to bat was Technorati, but unfortunately after only retrieving 0 hits out of 853799 - I decided to revise my search strategy, and do something that should work and should be talked about in the blogosphere. The search query was for the famed Nike 6.0 rider "Nigel Sylvester".
Query: Nigel Sylvester
Technorati: 74 - results with precision of (20/20) = 100%
IceRocket: 544 - with a (20 results) precision of (14/14+6) = 70%
With my current results, Technorati has IceRocket beat in terms of precision. Very impressive.
To discuss precision even further it's good to know, especially with blog search engines, that fact that the blog world is ever changing, and engines rarely display the exact same number of results, or same entries - so if you want to save information use a social bookmarking site such as Del.icio.us to ensure future reference. This is due to the speedy rate at which the blog world operates. If a blog is indexed, and new information is added, the results will change - making sure the most up to date information can be retrieved.
The "how many riders" search
To continue our engine journey, we will query "Nike 6.0 BMX team," with hopes of finding a quick list of names of the riders for the Nike 6.0 BMX (bike) team. To my disbelief, Technorati only came up with four results. Something must be wrong I thought to myself until I remembered, Technorati doesn't pull any information from sites outside of their indexed blogs.
Search engines such as Google collect data from billions of webpages and make this information accessible through search publicly, a process called indexing. Understanding that Technorati and IceRocket blog portal only indexes blogs, it is wiser to use a search engine like Google or Bing to answer a question such as mine - the Nike 6.0 BMX team list. Furthermore, my query could have easily been answered by a simple Google search or just going to http://www.nike.com/ and searching for the Nike 6.0 team, but for discussion purposes, I want to show you exactly the difference between a blog search engine and a regular webpage indexing engine.
Query: Nike 6.0 BMX team
Blog engine - IceRocket: 54 posts - none of which told me the individual names of the team members.
Blog engine - Technorati: 4 posts - similar to IceRocket, none helped.
Search engine - Google: 27,700 results and the first result revealed the answer to my question. Pretty efficient.
The answer, 5 riders. Garrett Reynolds, Nigel Sylvester, Dennis Enarson, Harry Main and Mike Spinner.
On Google, finding this answer took less and a minute and wasn't even possible to find on IceRocket or Technorati. So, this leads me to a question - In what way does a blog search engine reign supreme over a normal search engine? So far, from observation, when searching for individual opinion or the thoughts on a subject, use a blog search engine and open your eyes to what the blogosphere is talking about, but when looking for a simple fact or webpage, look no further than your normal engine such as Google, Bing or AltaVista.
Now that we are more clear on what exactly a blog engine does, let's further analyze which provides the best capability - IceRocket or Technorati.
Blog Engine Features
When using each of the blog search engines, it is important to understand some of the highlighted features that both IceRocket and Technorati have to offer. Below I will describe a couple, and it is up to you to decide which features will best help with what you are trying to accomplish.
A key feature that Technorati prides themselves on is their new system called "Technorati Authority". In a nutshell, this system ranks blogs on a series of criteria such as the site's number of back links, the influence within its category and how frequently the blog gets referenced. The system ranks on a scale of 0-1000, 1000 being the highest rating available. I find this system to be extremely helpful when trying to locate a reliable resource, or key piece of information.
In addition, for the Authority rating, Technorati does not take into consideration links pointing from blogrolls. The main reason for this, is the fact that many times blogroll link spots are sold to advertisers and those looking to gain more backlinks and are not populated by interest, but by $. Before Technorati made the change to eliminate these in October 2009, previous, links in blogrolls were considered in the ranking, encouraging the purchasing of spots on other high ranked blogs. Thus, being able to see a blog ranking without having individually weed through also saves a great deal of time and energy. Currently, nothing like this is employed by IceRocket - but would be a great added feature.
Twitter Search
This is a smaller portion for my analysis and will be focusing on the real-time twitter search. This is a feature that is not stressed by either company – as they are both trailing in this market to sites such as search.twitter.com and search.trendistic.com - but this is a feature that I would like you to try, instead of me ramble on about. Technorati calls their Twitter search interface - Twittorati, while IceRocket keeps it simple - with Twitter search.
IceRocket has a very simple twitter search interface and allows users to gain good insight into their given search such as the number of related posts per minute/hour/day depending on the frequency the keyword is tweeted. As well, if the keyword queried has an active twitter screen name attached, it will give their stats, such as how many people are following them and how many they are following. This is a feature that Technorati lacks, and would make a nice improvement to their system.
Twittorati seems to only retrieve tweets from "web famous" people, such as the founder of Mashable.com Pete Cashmere, and Chris Brogan - a social media expert. This takes a bit of the fun out of the search for me because I like to see what regular people are talking about, but at the same time this can be handy for someone looking to gain some good insight from a concentrated but different pool.
To end with a suggestion that I feel would make both search experiences all the better would be the addition of an automated search suggest. Currently neither engine features this, something similar to what Google recently adopted and is using right now, allowing users to automatically pick from a list of commonly searched words similar to what you are looking for. I think this would bring more substance to each engine and wouldn’t be too hard to implement either.
In conclusion, Technorati wins hands down. With an extensive indexing database, and with an overwhelmingly better homepage, IceRocket can't compete. Not only does Technorati have more to offer overall, it is also a more developed site in my opinion, with extensive time spent on keeping the site relevant in the blog search engine category.
Since engine precision is key to staying efficient while searching, Technorati came in at 100% each time that I used it for demonstration and (on average) hovered around 80%-100% when searching information on my term project as well, while IceRocket maintained a relatively mediocre 70%-80%, not to mention multiple duplicates per page. Technorati Authority ranking is also a feature that increases my liking for Technorati even more because it eliminates much hassle, while at the same time being a bit useful for bloggers alike. In my eyes, IceRocket has a ways to go if they want to compete with Technorati on ease of use, and helpfulness.
For my ruling on the Twitter search engines that IceRocket and Technorati had to offer, I count them equal - mainly stressing that depending on what you are looking to achieve, they each can be useful in some way. i.e. if you want regular people advice use IceRocket, but if you want "web famous" advice use Technorati's Twittorati.
Thank you very much for taking the time to read my analysis and make sure to comment on which engine you prefer, along with your reasoning.
Safe searching folks.
